Book review: "Respectable Sins"

I just finished Respectable Sins, by Jerry Bridges, and must heartily recommend it to anyone.  The reasons are multiple. 

How so?  Bridges models a beautiful portion of the Christian life by being a man with 50 years of ministry under his belt, multiple physical and life difficulties, and yet preserving a mind agile to the task of exegeting Scripture; he was over 75 when the book was published, an age when all too many are simply repeating what they've heard before.  Not Bridges; he retains a rather youthful ability to approach issues in a new, fresh way.

In doing so, he manages to draw a bead on the real issues which plague the church today; pride, gossip, hyper-criticality (not to be confused with "discernment"), anger, and the like.  Like Tedd Tripp's Shepherding a Child's Heart, this book succeeds in discerning where the actual issues lie.  It is not with music, or whether one drinks, or what kind of clothes one wears, but rather with.....the heart.

Through this, he also models how Christians ought to approach examples; Bridges does not shy away from giving examples from his own life, but he does shy away from naming the precise situations and the guilty, or blessed, parties.  All of us ought to have such a horror of gossip as Bridges displays!

One slight weakness ironically coexists with the great strength of the book, chapter 17 on judgmentalism.  He does a wonderful job explaining what our faith is not about per Romans 14 and elsewhere, and yet....there is something of a lack of clarity.  Even so, this may be a good thing; Bridges' entire point is, after all, to speak to our hearts and minds, and to derail us from our theological "hobby horses" we too often indulge.  Two thumbs up for this book!